EU wants open science publication by 2020

Axe hovers over journal publishers

Bet on furious lobbying to prevent this: the European Union's Competitiveness Council has recommended all scientific papers be made “open access” by 2020.

The Dutch presidency of the EU has issued this media release explaining what's on the table.

“From 2020, all scientific publications on the results of publicly funded research must be freely available. It also must be able to optimally reuse research data. To achieve that, the data must be made accessible, unless there are well-founded reasons for not doing so, for example intellectual property rights or security or privacy issues”, the release states.

The release says EU ministers responsible for innovation agreed unanimously on the proposal.

The League of European Universities has welcomed (PDF) the 2020 target as offering a “boost for the transition towards an open science system”.

The target is for papers to become available immediately upon publication, with “as short as possible embargoes”.

The news comes during an ongoing stoush over Sci-hub, which has been publishing science papers that are under the copyright of big names like Elsevier, which hit the site with injunctions in February.

Earlier this month, Sci-Hub added itself to the Telegram messenger app, letting people access its claimed 48 million publications by requesting the paper (by name) from a Telegram bot. ®